Every segment of modern society such as large corporations, government agencies, small businesses and also individuals constantly deal with large numbers of pre-printed forms to acquire information for their own use or to provide information to others. Most information on form type documents is permanent i.e. the information is pre-printed with blank fields for user entry.
In prior art information stored in computers is printed on forms by especially written computer programs that often require a technical individual (programmer) to create the desired computer programs. Any changes in the format of the pre-printed form requires rewriting of the computer program. This is often a tedious and time consuming process.
Prior art such as Microsoft Word provides a means for filling and printing on a pre-printed form. With Microsoft Word two documents are created separately, i.e. a Main document and a Data document. The Print Merge command is used to bring the varying information from the Data document into the Main document to create individualized copies of the form. The first paragraph in the Main document contains a DATA instruction. This instruction specifies the file name containing the data to be printed. The text of the main document contains field names which tell Microsoft Word what to print based on the contents of the fields. (Chapter 17, pgs 242-244 of the Microsoft Word manual explain the properties of field names.)
In prior art a method of extracting data from a pre-filled form does not exist.